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A simplified example of my app:
I have a HTML form as the output of a PHP script that gets a text from a database and fills an input of that form with it. There I can edit the text that on form submit is sent to a PHP script via a jQuery AJAX call. Through PHP the text is saved in the database and then the saved value is retrieved in PHP and sent in the JSON result of the AJAX call.
The character encoding of the HTML page is ISO-8859-1:

At first I submited the form with exactly the text that came from PHP at page load. It looked fine, bun when reloading the page, a weird text filled my form input. I had the text a×b and now I got aÃ—b.
I submitted the form again with text a×b and I studied the AJAX call response with Firebug. In both Console and Net tabs of Firebug, under Post tab of the call everything looked fine, but under Response tab I got “txt”:”a\u00d7b” instead of “txt”:”a×b”.
It looked like the text somwhere on the way back to the form got encoded in a weird manner. The × character is a Windows-1252 encoded character, not an UTF-8 encoded character and I should discover where the encoding of the text changed.
I submitted the correct text again and outputted the text saved in the database without json_encode-ing it:

echo $item['txt'];

In Firebug, in the Response tab of the AJAX call, even though under the Console tab of Firebug the text looked fine, under the Net tab it appeared like this: aÃ—b.

Again I submitted the correct text and outputted the value that came via AJAX:

echo $_POST['txt'];

And again I obtained the correct text under the Console tab and the incorrect one under the Net tab in Firebug, which meant that the encoding broke before the text got to the server.

Then, under Headers tab of the call, I noticed among the Request Headers: Content-Type application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8 and I thought maybe setting the character encoding of the jQuery.ajax call to ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8 would solve my problem:

But the result remained the same and even more, the Content-Type header did not change either. After lots of thinking and testing, I came to these conclusions:
1. If the data parameter of the jQuery.ajax call is not empty and the type parameter is set to “POST”, the character encoding of the request remains UTF-8 no matter what, so (if I want my encoding to take effect) what I would normaly put in the data parameter I should add to the query string of the url of the AJAX call and not specify or leave the data parameter empty (setting the value of empty string to the data parameter).
2. Explicitly setting the character encoding of the AJAX request to ISO-8859-1 didn’t help at all with my problem.
3. jQuery serialize function `messes up` special characters that are not UTF-8 encoded, because it uses JavaScript function encodeURIComponent which UTF-8-encodes special characters, so make sure to UTF-8-decode the texts in the server script when using jQuery serialize or JavaScript encodeURIComponent function in an AJAX call.

So I left the JavaScript code as it initially was (without specifying the contentType parameter to the jQuery.ajax call) and, in the PHP code, decoded the string before saving it in the database:

But now I get this weird result: a�b (diamond shaped character with question mark inside instead of special characters). This time in the Net tab of Firebug everything looks fine, while the diamond shaped characters appear in the Console tab and in the HTML page.

I solved it by explicitly setting (in PHP) the character encoding of the response of the AJAX call to ISO-8859-1 (thanks to this post):

Even though $value is not null, in the response of the AJAX call txt variable has the null value. Which means that json_encode function fails in the case of my text. As I later discovered, that is because the text I got from the database contained non-UTF-8 encoded characters and in the first parameter of the json_encode function, as PHP manual says, `All string data must be UTF-8 encoded.`
So if you want to handle non-UTF-8 encoded characters through jQuery AJAX calls with JSON data type response, you should make your own JSON encoding function. A basic example would be:

So we have a function that adds a handler function that is called after an ajax load or at a later time and we need to execute the handler function code for each item inside an array allowing the function to access the array values. Usually with the simplest try you would get some code that get’s executed with invalid variable values. Examples are below.

did not work at all on Internet Explorer – no javascript or style files were loaded and worked partially in Mozilla Firefox – a few javascript files were not pointing to the path that should be transformed by base href attribute.

This code produced a page with no style files and no javascript files included in Interenet Explorer 8 and a few javascript files (j1.js and j2.js) were not included in Firefox 3.5 because base tag was not applied. After several tests and all kind of different arrangements we discovered that the problem was the output before the page source the

Array ...

thing.

Solution: no output before the page’s headers otherwise you can get all kind of strange results including a html base tag not working correctly.

Full error message: Object doesn’t support property or method. I got this error message in Internet Explorer 7 every time i tried to run code similar to the next snippet:

window.opener.form.select[select.length] = new Option(text, value);

The problem is that on Internet Explorer due to some mysterious security restrictions you are not allowed to add new options in a select element that resides in the parent (opener) window. In order to do this you need a workaround.

The easiest workaround is to write a function in the parent window that adds elements in the select element. The function should look something like this:

Note that if we only have one checkbox, the variable cb it is not considered an array, but a normal variable. This is useful in the situation of dinamically generated HTML pages (using PHP, for example) and the number of checkboxes varies from page to page.